If you've been living under a rock for a while, you could be forgiven for not knowing about Terraform and how awesome it is. Today, Terraform is one of the hottest new tools in the Cloud Automation space. Terraform can allow you to manage infrastructure as code for nearly any cloud platform, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, vRA, Kubernetes the list goes on. It's an easy to use tool that has tremendous potential for efficiency for anyone that deploys infrastructure using any popular cloud platform. In a few…

In an earlier article, I covered what the basics of the NSX Distributed Firewall allow you to accomplish. Now let's take a deeper look at those concepts and figure out the best way to apply them in a real life scenario. If you do a good enough job and you're a little lucky too, you can end up with a easily manageable firewall configuration that you very rarely need to touch, even when adding new components. The target is set, let's get started on our journey to Distributed Firewall nirvana. …

Many companies nowadays are getting serious about adopting the “Devops” mentality and treating anything IT Teams produce “as code”. For most people, that phrase in itself doesn’t mean much until they see a concrete use case that can really benefit from such a concept. If you use vRealize Automation as a Cloud Platform, you’ll come across some concepts that can fit the “code” mold. Let’s dive deeper into this use case. vRealize Automation creates a problem The problem comes along when you add a 2nd vRA instance into your environment,…

Hello to my readers! I apologize if I've been MIA the past few weeks, it's because I've been very busy : my wife and I just had our first child! So that's kind of taking up a lot of my time for now… 🙂 Everyone is happy, healthy and tired! I'm currently buried deep in diapers, pink baby clothes and baby bottles, but rest assured: I have not forgotten about you! Also, since my last blog post, I received the great news that I've been awarded the title of VMware…

VMware NSX has quite a few different functionalities, some of those come from binaries installed directly in the ESXi kernel, others come from another important component of NSX, one that is often called the Swiss army knife of virtual networking : the Edge Services Gateway. The ESG gives you a bunch of different features, such as Routing, Firewalling, Load Balancing, multiple types of VPN connections and more. In this post, we’ll go through the functionality you get when using an NSX Edge Services Gateway to Load Balance network traffic and we’ll…

Remember when paper maps were the only way to get around, then GPS came out and changed the game? That's sort of what VMware did with vRealize Automation 7's Software Components feature. Let's move on from that questionable metaphor to take a deeper look at how Software Components work in vRealize Automation and what you can use them for. Software Components in vRealize Automation 7 are a blessing. They make execution of nearly any command in a VMs Guest OS at deployment time extremely easy. The basic premise is that you…

A vRealize Automation 7 installation is something that can be fairly different from one organization to the next. There is quite a few different components involved in it and most of them are flexible enough for you to have a truly granular control of them and how they will perform. So in this post, we'll take a look at a real life example of a vRA7 distributed installation. Hopefully, this post will give most of you a guide to follow if you don't know where to start. As it is…

If you've heard of VMware NSX, you might have heard of a Distributed "this" and a Distributed "that". This post is here to help you understand what exactly what "this" and "that" are. In my last post, I dove into the NSX Distributed Firewall. Today, we'll be looking into the NSX Distributed Router and what makes it tick. So without further ado, let's take a look at it together and demystify what this Distributed Logical Router thing really is. What is a DLR? The Distributed Logical Router, or DLR, does what it says,…

The NSX Distributed Firewall is one of the truly big innovative features that VMware has brought to its customers in the past few years. It is also one of the big selling points of VMware NSX. Anytime you hear something about "micro-segmentation", that's basically VMware marketing lingo referring to the Distributed Firewall feature. So let's take a look at what the DFW can do for you and how you can best take advantage of it for your organization's needs. Dude, where's my Distributed Firewall? The NSX Distributed Firewall is like…

There's been a ton of buzz around vRealize Automation 7's Event Broker since vRA7's release in December, with good reason. The Event Broker really takes vRA's extensibility capabilities to a whole new level. I though I would give you an overview of what the EB can do for you and the basics of how to use it. The main purpose of the Event Broker is to run a vRealize Orchestrator workflow when a given event occurs. The enormous flexibility of the EB comes from the fact that you can select from…